TechSutram(/=1)

Thinking Software Testing

2013-05-08T23:00:00.000+05:30

The primary goal of testing is to improve Quality of end product. No! No! I am not saying its only responsibility of (quality) engineers. Rather I feel that it is a collaborative job where every individual working on any piece of software at hand is responsible for end product / outcome. This individual could be program manager or product manager (some organizations may have both mixed with single role / title) who is managing release program or software development engineer who is writing a code or software quality engineer who is verifying/testing the code or document writers working on product documentation. The best analogy that I can think of is aircraft. If any one of the functions that we described (as example) in above roles does not produce quality outcome then aircraft may never fly due to prolong delays or it may malfunction immediately before/after takeoff or after prolong operation in air :) or incorrect documentation that may create trouble while flying. The later three are bit scary!!!

Every individual who is part of product release should strive to maintain quality of outcome in his own capacity with strict controls. Controls that ensure quality from different perspectives. I could think of different perspectives by answering following questions,

1. Customer
- How easily customer can deploy our software product? How smooth is upgrade process in case of new release?
- After installation, how much time does our software product take to become fully functional? Does it preserve previous customer configuration and works as expected?
- How easy to configure our software product?
- How many features does customer really needs?
- How our software product/outcome will be used and in which environment?
- What are different software product configurations customers may deploy?
- How much stress will be applied to each of the software product configuration in customer environment?
- Is there any proactive mechanism in place to alert customer of possible near-time issues/problems with deployed configuration?
- How much cost savings customer brings in if s/he decides deploys our software product?
- Does software function as it is intended to function over prolonged and continuous usages in all supported configurations?
- Does our software product cause downtime to itself and any other products in its ecosystem?

2. Engineering
- Does software product undergo full functional testing?
- What are the domains of expertise needed to test our product? If there are no in-house expertise or subject matter experts not available then how to bring expertise to test the product?
- What are the different customer problems that our software product solves?
- What are the ideal performance numbers in terms of load testing and stress testing?
- Are these performance numbers are documented in product documentation?
- Do any of the new features have caused possible regressions?
- How much automation is in place to identify regressions as quickly as possible and to speedup the testing process in future releases?
- How agile is overall development process?
- Does change control mechanism is in place?
- Does software test repository is actively maintained and tracked?
- What should be the ideal functional and conditional code coverage?
- What is the mechanism to deliver a fix if there is critical bug found while in-house testing after product is generally available (GA) or at customer site?
- What should be the ideal response time to deliver critical fixes?

3. Market
- What are the advantages (features) over other competing software products?
- Does this release time the market or is it really needed?

I have added market perspective above because I feel that if software product does not sell then it is very difficult to prove that it is a quality product. :) I am sure that there are many other areas that are left untouched. Feel free to add your comments that stimulate thinking in testing.

HP-UX disk multipathing health status

2013-04-19T23:00:00.000+05:30

Sometimes it is required not only to monitor disks/luns attached to machine but also status of those disks. Status of disks means the path available to disks/LUNS e.g say disk/LUN "A" and how many paths to disk/LUN "A".

Below CLI lists disks attached to HP-UX machine,

bash-2.05b# ioscan -fnC disk
Class     I H/W Path Driver S/W State   H/W Type     Description
==================================================================
disk      0 0/0/0/2/0/0/0.0.0              sdisk   CLAIMED     DEVICE       HP      LOGICAL VOLUME
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0     /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1   /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2   /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3   /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0    /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s1 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s3
disk     13 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.2.16.255.0.0.0   sdisk   CLAIMED     DEVICE    XXX     XXX
                      /dev/dsk/c3t0d0   /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0
disk     14 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.2.16.255.0.0.1   sdisk   CLAIMED     DEVICE    XXX     XXX
                      /dev/dsk/c3t0d1   /dev/rdsk/c3t0d1
disk     15 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.2.16.255.0.0.2   sdisk   CLAIMED     DEVICE    XXX     XXX
                      /dev/dsk/c3t0d2   /dev/rdsk/c3t0d2
disk     16 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.2.16.255.0.0.3   sdisk   CLAIMED     DEVICE    XXX     XXX
                      /dev/dsk/c3t0d3   /dev/rdsk/c3t0d3

.
.
.

Mapping to legacy DSF to that of persistent DSF is already covered in one of the older posts, HP-UX disk mapping between persistent and legacy DSF

Now in order to view health of all LUNS we can use same ioscan CLI,

bash-2.05b# ioscan -P health -C disk
Class     I H/W Path health
===============================
disk     23 64000/0xfa00/0x1   online
disk     24 64000/0xfa00/0x3   online
disk     25 64000/0xfa00/0x4   online
disk     26 64000/0xfa00/0x5   online
.
.
.

Now considering there are multiple paths to the LUNS their status is equally important for high availability of data. To get the status of all lunpaths to the disks or luns attached to the HP-UX server we will use same ioscan CLI with slightly different syntax,

bash-2.05b# ioscan -P health -C lunpath
Class     I H/W Path health
===============================
lunpath   0 0/0/0/2/0/0/0.0x0.0x0 online
lunpath   1 0/0/0/2/0/0/0.0x0.0x4000000000000000 online
lunpath 16 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.0x5000097408159d20.0x0 online
lunpath 21 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.0x5000097408159d20.0x1000000000000 online
lunpath 22 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.0x5000097408159d20.0x2000000000000 online
lunpath 23 0/0/0/5/0/0/0.0x5000097408159d20.0x3000000000000 online.
.
.
.

We can observe that status of lunpath is online. For more status strings check out ioscan man page.

"perl: warning: Setting locale failed." : Solved : How To?

2013-04-18T23:00:00.000+05:30

I have started receiving perl locale warnings despite LC_CTYPE was set to "en_IN" . Don't know what triggered it on my machine!
Every perl script call was emitting these locale warnings.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
   LANGUAGE = (unset),
   LC_ALL = (unset),
   LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
   LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

Well I know there are different ways to solve this problem based on different distribution to make it work. But frankly the easiest and classic way is to add below entries into /etc/profile

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Another way could be ,
echo “LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 ” >> /etc/default/locale

If wondering which locale to add then below CLI will list all supported locale on linux box,

$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
de_CH.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX
zh_CN.utf8
zh_SG.utf8

Will it cause any repercussions? I don't know. But aleast on my machine this solved the problem and stopped giving "perl: warning: Setting locale failed." warning messages and till now everything seems to be going fine.

dbprofile to boot from Ignite Server

2013-04-17T23:00:00.000+05:30

It is always convenient to install different Integrity VM (s) or vPar (s) from Ignite server and sometimes (there could be many situations) virtual machines or vPars do not receive IP address from Ignite server.

To proceed in such situations, boot machine (could be virtual) and change to EFI shell and create "dbprofile"

shell> dbprofile -dn -sip -gip -cip -m -b "/opt/ignite/bin/nbp.efi"

This will create dbprofile entry with name .
Now in order to proceed with installation, use following CLI from same shell prompt as below...

shell>lanboot -dn

And voila! Installation proceeds.
That is it for today.

WWN on AIX: How To?

2013-04-16T23:58:00.000+05:30

Below are the commands used to identify WWNs on AIX,
#lsdev -Cc adapter | grep -i fcs
Above CLI will list all HBAs (FC port) detected by AIX. Lets say from the output we determine one of the FCs as fcs0
#lscfg -vpi fcs0
This CLI will display all information about fcs0. If we want specific information about WWN then we can easily grep the output of above CLI as below,
#lscfg -vi fcs0 | grep -i Network

WWN on HP-UX: How To?

2013-04-15T23:45:00.000+05:30

Below are the commands used to identify WWNs on HP-UX,
#ioscan -fnC fc
Above CLI will list all HBAs (FC port) detected by HP-UX. Lets say from the output we determine one of the FCs as /dev/fcd0
#fcmutil /dev/fcd0
This CLI will display all information about /dev/fcd0. If we want specific information about WWN then we can easily grep the output of above CLI as below,
#fcmutil /dev/fcd0 | grep -i WWN

HP-UX depothelper to download dependencies for open source ports

2013-03-28T23:50:00.000+05:30

I always needed to install gcc, bash and wget on HP-UX. Open source ports of most of such kind of softwares are available for download at http://hpux.connect.org.uk/.

However, installing any of these requires satisfying different dependencies from http://hpux.connect.org.uk

Depothelper is one such tool from http://hpux.connect.org.uk. It downloads all required dependencies required for your pre-complied depots from http://hpux.connect.org.uk/

Below is the example for installing gcc from http://hpux.connect.org.uk/. It eventually failed to install gcc but that was due to space constraints and requires some amount of work. But below example suffice to explain the overall concept and working of Depothelper tool.

-----------------------------START------------------------------>
(root@hp-box)[/My_Depots] swinstall -s /My_Depots/depothelper-2.00-ia64-11.31.depot depothelper

======= 03/25/13 15:58:50 IST BEGIN swinstall SESSION
         (non-interactive) (jobid=hp-box-0191)

       * Session started for user "root@hp-box".

       * Beginning Selection
       * Target connection succeeded for "hp-box:/".
       * Source:
         /My_Depots/depothelper-2.00-ia64-11.31.depot
       * Targets:                hp-box:/
       * Software selections:
             depothelper.depothelper-RUN,r=2.00,a=HP-UX_B.11.31_64
       * Selection succeeded.

       * Beginning Analysis and Execution
       * Session selections have been saved in the file
         "/.sw/sessions/swinstall.last".
       * The analysis phase succeeded for "hp-box:/".
       * The execution phase succeeded for "hp-box:/".
       * Analysis and Execution succeeded.

NOTE:    More information may be found in the agent logfile using the
         command "swjob -a log hp-box-0191 @ hp-box:/".

======= 03/25/13 15:59:19 IST END swinstall SESSION (non-interactive)
         (jobid=hp-box-0191)

(root@hp-box)[/My_Depots] depothelper
depothelper: Must specify at least one package[-version]

Syntax: depothelper [options] package[-version] [package[-version]...]

Options are as follows:
-a specifies the machine architecture (ia64|hppa)
-c specifies the cache directory for downloaded files
-e set number of days before cache package expiry (default 93)
-f forces depot downloads/installs, even if already downloaded/installed
-h (or -?) displays this syntax message
-l [package[-version]...] lists packages with their dependencies. If no
   parameter is supplied, all installed packages are displayed
-n will download the depots but not install them. If -u is also supplied,
   then a list of depots (including any dependencies) to be uninstalled
   will be displayed rather than actually being uninstalled
-o specifies the depot OS version to download (11.11|11.23|11.31)
-p specifies that an FTP proxy server will be used
-r will remove downloaded depots that successfully installed
-u uninstalls the specified packages and if possible, uninstalls
   their dependencies as well

If -a/-o don't specify hppa/11.31, then -n is assumed (i.e. no install)
(root@hp-box)[/My_Depots] depothelper gcc
======================================================================================================================================================
Package-version      Comment              Download        Install
======================================================================================================================================================
hppa-11.31           Package list         OK              OK
gettext-0.16.1       Uninstall old ver.   N/A             OK
gettext-0.18.2       Dependency (01/03)   OK              OK
libiconv-1.11        Uninstall old ver.   N/A             OK
libiconv-1.14        Dependency (02/03)   OK              OK
zlib-1.2.3           Uninstall old ver.   N/A             OK
zlib-1.2.7           Dependency (03/03)   OK              OK
gcc-4.2.3            Requested            Downloading...
gcc-4.2.3            Requested            OK              FAILED
======================================================================================================================================================
(root@hp-box)[/My_Depots]
<-----------------------------END---------------------------------

Hope it helps.

NTFS write support on Mac OS X 10.8.2

2013-02-28T23:01:00.001+05:30

NTFS write support for 1TB external drive is tested and following procedure worked for me.

OS X version used: 10.8.2

1. Install OSXFUSE 2.5.4 from
http://osxfuse.github.com
Select MacFuse compatibility layer by selecting customize installation option.

2. Install fuse_wait-1.1.pkg from
https://github.com/bfleischer/fuse_wait/downloads

3. Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2010.5.22 support from
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.in/2010/10/ntfs-3g-for-mac-os-x-2010102.html

Warning: Installation order should not changed and use it at your own risk. I am not a Mac OS X Expert.

I tried reading/writing big files of size 4+ GB. It worked well for me. All the best.

Bash loop one liners that are must have

2012-10-18T23:55:00.001+05:30

There is often a need to write to do simple tasks such as to process set of files, querying packages etc. Below are the one liners that can be used often not only on Linux and Unices but also on Windows (refer to above image :) ). If someone finds Windows word confusing then please refer to one of my older posts viz. Bash environment on Windows: This is not Cygwin

Following useful one liner will display name of every file in <your_dir> and search for <pattern> in every file in current <your_dir> and display file name if match is found.

# for FILE in `ls <your_dir>`;do grep <pattern> $FILE && echo $FILE; done

It is often required to create infinite running scripts such as generating system load in software testing. It is fairly straight forward to use while loop in such cases.

# while test 1;do echo “Infinite loop” > /dev/null; done

Replace echo statement with any other load generating scripts if this single one liner does not suffice.

It is also possible to search and replace across different files based on specific pattern. But that will be too much of work in shell programming. However there is fairly easy Perl liner that is available and posted long back as a post Search and Replace across multiple files

Mobile platform possibilities

2012-10-17T22:27:00.001+05:30

Consumer cloud computing services are successful due to the sudden jump in smart phones and tablet kind of devices. Internet based services are now easily accessible to whole lot of users who do not use PC (personal computer).

Though virtualization being “one” of the main infrastructure components of cloud computing environment, it’s hardly popular on smart phone platforms though there are some mobile virtualization platforms available. To name few are VMware, Open Kernel labs.

But the question that I am trying to dig into is, would it not be cool if smart phone users have choice of installing/using either, say, Android or Windows on their phones/tablets and switch between these two? If one of the OS crashes then users will have option to switch to brand new OS on same smart phone/tablets ready with all apps. Yes! I am referring to availability part in consumer devices. Also as smart phone/tablets gets more and more smart in terms of high performing hardware that is being built, the more and more existing/future applications can be deployed in smart phones and who knows! the data center future may belong to devices of smart phone sizes. It is also quite possible that few of the server applications that are running on enterprise class server may no longer be needed as smart phone/tablets combined with high speed wireless internet may achieve same results with peer-to-peer connections.

As you see there are immense possibilities lying ahead. We have to just wait and see how these technologies will transform people’s lives in future ahead. I understand that I have listed very few possibilities so do post your comments with your views in comments below.

MySQL on Windows…port connection refused

2012-08-28T12:51:00.001+05:30

I was trying to setup MySQL + PHP + Apache on Windows individually and tried to get it work. Installations went fine and below are the versions used for Apache, PHP and MySQL,

+ httpd-2.2.22-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.8t.msi (thread safe)

+ php-5.3.16-Win32-VC9-x86.msi

+ mysql-5.5.27-win32.msi (thread safe)

However, when I tried to connect to MySQL database, PHP scripts were not able to connect MySQL database. This was strange since everything seemed to be working fine. I thought this was a problem related to firewall. But on system inspection, I could see that MySQL port 3306 (default) was not up

C:\>netstat -na | grep 3306

C:\>

After an hour of troubleshooting, I could identify the problem.

C:\>

We can see above command output states that networking is OFF. What we need to do is to edit “C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\my.ini” and set “skip_networking” flag to OFF either by commenting it in my.ini file or deleting it altogether. After saving my.ini restart MySQL service on Windows. And I could see port activated in netstat as below.

C:\>netstat -na | grep 3306
TCP 0.0.0.0:3306 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING

C:\>

At last the process worked for me.

Bullseye merge code coverage files

2012-06-20T16:44:00.001+05:30

Bullseye is one of the testing tools that can be utilized to measure code coverage of software. Bullseye has a feature that helps merge different coverage files into one and get the combined code coverage percentage into a single Bullseye code coverage file.

Below is the CLI that can be used to merge two Bullseye coverage files viz. Bullseye_source1.cov and Bullseye_source2.cov into single target_merge.cov file.

#/path/to/bullseye/bin/covmerge -c –ftarget_merge.cov Bullseye_source1.cov Bullseye_source2.cov

Linux : Fedora 17 released

2012-05-31T17:13:00.001+05:30

On 29th May 2012, Fedora project announced release of Fedora 17. Major enhancements include GNOME 3.4 shell, OpenStack. Also inclusion of an open virtualization platform oVirt

Fedora 17 features are listed here.

C++11 Style by Bjarne Stroustrup

2012-05-12T19:30:00.001+05:30

Channel9 video on C++11 Style by Bjarne Stroustrup

Original Video link: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Keynote-Bjarne-Stroustrup-Cpp11-Style#

HTC ChaCha on low storage space

2012-05-03T17:08:00.001+05:30

One of the problems with HTC ChaCha mobile phone is its low storage space. After installing two or three applications, it starts going low on storage space. There are options to clear the memory space such as resetting to factory defaults that frees up most of the space but it is not always viable option.

The method that I helped me to get out of low storage space is cleaning up cache and data for most of the unused applications. To do that navigate to Menu >> Settings >> Applications >> Manage Applications. Now select your applications and start clearing Data and cache by pressing “Clear data” and “Clear cache” buttons. Caution: Note that these operations will delete all the data right from user name and password for that application. So exercise caution while cleaning up data and cache of critical applications.

Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive

2012-04-28T14:16:00.001+05:30

Google Drive news is all over the internet. If you are not aware then here is the blog announcement. It offers 5 GB of (free) storage.

Now here is another service, Windows Live SkyDrive from Microsoft that provides 25GB of (free) storage and this service is pretty old one. However, storage is recently being downgraded from 25GB to 7GB. However, existing SkyDrive customers have been provided with option to keep 25GB of storage but with user’s consent.

So even MS has started earlier in the league with SkyDrive, considering penetration of Android on mobile devices Google drive has real advantage over Windows SkyDrive. SkyDrive supported and available on iOS. Personally I would love to have official SkyDrive app on my Android device but as of now there is none. But in case of no options on Android devices, users like me will start shifting to Google Drive though they would like to use SkyDrive.

How Linux is built – The Linux foundation video

2012-04-03T23:52:00.001+05:30

Linux open ports – How To

2012-03-11T23:35:00.001+05:30

There are many ways to identify open ports on Linux box.

1. Linux open ports using port scanning – nmap

Below nmap command lists TCP ports that are open,

linux-ts:/home/techsutram # nmap -sT 127.0.0.1

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012-03-11 21:41 IST
mass_dns: warning: Unable to determine any DNS servers. Reverse DNS is disabled. Try using --system-dns or specify valid servers with --dns-servers
Interesting ports on localhost (127.0.0.1):
Not shown: 995 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
25/tcp   open smtp
80/tcp   open http
111/tcp open rpcbind
631/tcp open ipp
3306/tcp open mysql

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.37 seconds

Below nmap command lists UDP ports that are open,

linux-ts:/home/techsutram# nmap -sU 127.0.0.1

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012-03-11 21:41 IST
mass_dns: warning: Unable to determine any DNS servers. Reverse DNS is disabled. Try using --system-dns or specify valid servers with --dns-servers
Interesting ports on localhost (127.0.0.1):
Not shown: 997 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
111/udp open|filtered rpcbind
631/udp open|filtered ipp
5353/udp open|filtered zeroconf

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.37 seconds

2. Linux open ports using command ‘lsof’

linux-techsutram:/home/techsutram # lsof -i
COMMAND    PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
rpcbind   2680   root    6u IPv4   9038      0t0 UDP *:sunrpc
rpcbind   2680   root    7u IPv4   9049      0t0 UDP *:iris-xpc
rpcbind   2680   root    8u IPv4   9050      0t0 TCP *:sunrpc (LISTEN)
rpcbind   2680   root    9u IPv6   9052      0t0 UDP *:sunrpc
rpcbind   2680   root   10u IPv6   9054      0t0 UDP *:iris-xpc
rpcbind   2680   root   11u IPv6   9055      0t0 TCP *:sunrpc (LISTEN)
avahi-dae 2825 avahi   13u IPv4   9451      0t0 UDP *:mdns
avahi-dae 2825 avahi   14u IPv4   9452      0t0 UDP *:56745
cupsd     2845   root    4u IPv6   9545      0t0 TCP localhost:ipp (LISTEN)
cupsd     2845   root    5u IPv4   9546      0t0 TCP localhost:ipp (LISTEN)
cupsd     2845   root    7u IPv4   9549      0t0 UDP *:ipp
mysqld    3182 mysql   10u IPv4 10305      0t0 TCP *:mysql (LISTEN)
master    3605   root   12u IPv4 11177      0t0 TCP localhost:smtp (LISTEN)
master    3605   root   13u IPv6 11193      0t0 TCP localhost:smtp (LISTEN)
httpd2-pr 3774   root    3u IPv4 11718      0t0 TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd2-pr 3775 wwwrun    3u IPv4 11718      0t0 TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd2-pr 3776 wwwrun    3u IPv4 11718      0t0 TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd2-pr 3777 wwwrun    3u IPv4 11718      0t0 TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd2-pr 3778 wwwrun    3u IPv4 11718      0t0 TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd2-pr 3779 wwwrun    3u IPv4 11718      0t0 TCP *:http (LISTEN)

For each of the above named service, you can get their port numbers by going through /etc/services.

Below is the one liner that goes though /etc/services for every matched named service in lsof output,

linux-techsutram:/home/techsutram # for name in `lsof -i | awk '{print $8":"$9}' | cut -d: -f3 | grep -v NAME | uniq `;do echo $name && grep -w ^$name /etc/services ;done

3. Linux open ports using 'socklist'

linux-techsutram:/home/techsutram # socklist
type   port      inode     uid    pid   fd name
tcp     111       9050       0   2680    8 rpcbind
tcp      80      11718       0   3779    3 httpd2-prefork
tcp     631       9546       0   2845    5 cupsd
tcp      25      11177       0   3605   12 master
tcp    3306      10305      60   3182   10 mysqld
tcp6    111       9055       0   2680   11 rpcbind
tcp6    631       9545       0   2845    4 cupsd
tcp6     25      11193       0   3605   13 master
udp   56745       9452     109   2825   14 avahi-daemon
udp     713       9049       0   2680    7 rpcbind
udp    5353       9451     109   2825   13 avahi-daemon
udp     111       9038       0   2680    6 rpcbind
udp     631       9549       0   2845    7 cupsd
udp6    713       9054       0   2680   10 rpcbind
udp6    111       9052       0   2680    9 rpcbind

4. Linux open ports using ‘netstat’

linux-techsutram:/home/techsutram # netstat -napl --tcp
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:111             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2680/rpcbind
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3774/httpd2-prefork
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:631           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2845/cupsd
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:25            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3605/master
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3306            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3182/mysqld
tcp        0      0 :::111                  :::*                    LISTEN      2680/rpcbind
tcp        0      0 ::1:631                 :::*                    LISTEN      2845/cupsd
tcp        0      0 ::1:25                  :::*                    LISTEN      3605/master
linux-techsutram:/home/techsutram # netstat -napl --udp
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:56745           0.0.0.0:*                           2825/avahi-daemon:
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:713             0.0.0.0:*                           2680/rpcbind
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5353            0.0.0.0:*                           2825/avahi-daemon:
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:111             0.0.0.0:*                           2680/rpcbind
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:631             0.0.0.0:*                           2845/cupsd
udp        0      0 :::713                  :::*                                2680/rpcbind
udp        0      0 :::111                  :::*                                2680/rpcbind

we can combine output of above two CLIs into single netstat command as,

linux-techsutram:/home/techsutram # netstat -napltu
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:111             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2680/rpcbind
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3774/httpd2-prefork
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:631           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2845/cupsd
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:25            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3605/master
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3306            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3182/mysqld
tcp        0      0 :::111                  :::*                    LISTEN      2680/rpcbind
tcp        0      0 ::1:631                 :::*                    LISTEN      2845/cupsd
tcp        0      0 ::1:25                  :::*                    LISTEN      3605/master
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:56745           0.0.0.0:*                           2825/avahi-daemon:
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:713             0.0.0.0:*                           2680/rpcbind
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5353            0.0.0.0:*                           2825/avahi-daemon:
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:111             0.0.0.0:*                           2680/rpcbind
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:631             0.0.0.0:*                           2845/cupsd
udp        0      0 :::713                  :::*                                2680/rpcbind
udp        0      0 :::111                  :::*                                2680/rpcbind

Windows Live Writer could not post to blogger solved

2012-03-03T18:00:00.001+05:30

Generally I use Windows Live writer to post blog updates. However, for last few posts I couldn’t post using Windows Live writer as it was unable to authenticate with blogger.

Today I decided to drill down to the problem and found the issue was the two step authentication/verification that was enabled against my account. However, I was not in favor of disabling two step authentication either.

There is very easy way to solve this problem. Just navigate to your account settings (Click your name on top right corner and then Account settings). Now under security select 2-step verification and press edit. Under “Application-specific passwords”, click “Manage application-specific passwords”. It might ask for password authentication and upon authentication “Authorized Access to your Google Account” page will be displayed. Now under “Application-specific passwords”, type in name of your application name e.g. “Windows_Live_Writer” and press “Generate Password” button. A new page with password will be displayed. Use that password with Windows Live Writer and there you go.

I tried it for my blog and it worked for me. This post itself uploaded using Windows Live writer after fixing the same problem. Hope this helps.

Software Testing : Differences Defect Severity Vs Priority

2012-02-28T00:51:00.001+05:30

Defect severity and priority is one of the most basic and often ambiguous terminologies in software testing field. Below table tries to differentiate software defect severity and priority.

Defect Severity	Defect Priority
Severity equates to Impact	Priority equates to sense of urgency
Assigned by a person who opens a defect/bug e.g. SQA engineer, Support engineer, Software engineer etc.	Assigned by a person who owns and understands customer requirements and release requirements .e.g. Software Development Manager, Project Manager etc.
Categorization of defect severity for an organization is predefined. Generally integrated in defect management system	Categorization of defect priority for an organization is predefined. Generally integrated in defect management system
Defect severity categorization example… S1 – High S2 – Medium S3 – Low	Defect priority categorization example… P1 – High P2 – Medium P3 – Low
S1 examples… Crashes, core-dump,memory leak,data loss, security vulnerabilities, show-stopper ,i.e. anything that prevents product from functioning,	P1 examples… Direct customer impact, may affect release schedule if not fixed
S2 examples… Severe feature issues, occasional crashes, may not always be reproducible such as corner cases, affects major product functionality but has reasonable workaround, reasonable customer impact	P2 examples… any sever issue that should be fixed as soon as possible, may affect the further testing or development of either same or dependent feature
S3 examples… minor functionality problems, word spacing, grammatical mistakes, low customer impact	P3 examples… any bug that can be fixed in due course of development

Please note that categorization & examples of priority and severity are subjective and depends on an organization.

Software Testing Course

2012-02-18T14:52:00.000+05:30

I have been working with many different softwares/technologies over the years. Part of it was on administration, development and software testing. I have decided to combine my experience with theory of software testing aiming to generate helpful content on subject of software testing. I don’t claim to be an expert and consider myself as student who is learning continuously no matter how obvious the topic of interest is. We often tend to realize new things when we start contemplating on the subject and hopefully the upcoming posts on software testing help provide me with this opportunity…

OpenSUSE 12.1 and Multimedia

2012-02-16T23:41:00.000+05:30

Post few months release of OpenSUSE 12.1, I found time to upgrade my Linux box to OpenSUSE 12.1 and was looking for multimedia support to play mp3, avi and other format.
Thank to one of my older posts OpenSUSE 11.3 and Multimedia that helped me drill down to codec support immediately. Yes! This blog helps, me at-least :)

1-Click installers for KDE and GNOME are:
KDE 1-click codec installer: codecs-kde.ymp
GNOME 1-click codec installer: codecs-gnome.ymp

Process monitoring on Unix/Linux/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX

2011-12-04T16:31:00.001+05:30

It’s often a requirement to monitor Unix processes in the field of performance monitoring. However, there is a catch. Different flavors of Unix have different process monitoring tools such as `top`. Of course `top` is not available on all platforms. Similarly HP-UX has something called ‘glance’. This is again very platform specific.

The only CLI that is supported for process monitoring across different flavors of Unix is ‘ps’. However, one of the most two parameters that we are interested in process monitoring is its SIZE and CPU usages. Both of these parameters can be retrieved using ‘ps’ CLI.

To obtain size of a process, we generally use PS parameters ‘vsz’. It’s the size of process in virtual memory. To obtain CPU usages of a process, we generally use PS parameter `cpu` which gives absolute CPU usage of a process. On some Unices, PS provides parameter called ‘pcpu’ which provides percentage of CPU usage by a process. There are still limitations of this approach as described above. Few of the unices do not provide ‘pcpu’ parameter and instead provide ‘cpu’ parameter e.g HP-UX.

However, it’s still better to rely on single UNIX provided `ps` CLI that can be used inside a any shell or Perl script. In order to use `ps` CLI we should be relying on UNIX95 Unix standard as defined in the Single UNIX Specification.

e.g. Following CLI prints “our_process” usages on HP-UX with columns viz. process name, its virtual memory size and its absolute CPU usages on single line. It is just a matter of changing cpu to pcpu and application of few filters on some of the Unix platforms as per our requirements. But it does work.

# export UNIX95=1; ps –eo args,vsz,cpu | grep “our_process”

It just a matter of directing output of above CLI to a file post application of filters

# cntr=1;while test $cntr;do export UNIX95=1; ps -eo args,vsz,sz,cpu |egrep -v "our_process" | awk '{print $1"\t"$2\”\t”$4}' ;done >> /tmp/our_process.txt &

Above while loop keep on dumping process virtual memory size and CPU usages of our_process in /tmp/our_process.txt file. Since output is in tabbed format, this output file can be easily opened in Microsoft Excel and graphs can be plotted.

Do you use any other methodology to monitor processes on Unix machines? If yes then do let everyone know in comments below.

CPU Info – Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX

2011-09-30T22:36:00.001+05:30

Below are the CLIs to display CPU information on Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.

LINUX:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo

SOLARIS:

# psrinfo –v

# prtdiag

or

# prtdiag | grep SUNW

# prtconf

AIX:

# lscfg -l proc*

and

# lsattr -El <proc_num_from_above_cli>

HP-UX:

# machinfo

High Availability Lens 3

2011-09-30T21:19:00.001+05:30

In previous high availability lens 2, we saw general formula to express availability in terms of uptime and downtime. And also in terms of MTBF and MTTR.

MTTR is mean time to repair ,i.e. average time required to repair a failure. If we look at the formula for availability in terms of MTBF and MTTR, we can observe that we can make very interesting conclusion. As MTTR tends to zero, availability tends to 1 ,i.e. 100%

And this is where clustering softwares come into picture by helping MTTR reduce by automation. It should be also noted that MTTR is affected by lot of complexities such as application dependencies, underlying hardware being used etc.

TechSutram(*/*=1)

Thinking Software Testing

HP-UX disk multipathing health status

"perl: warning: Setting locale failed." : Solved : How To?

dbprofile to boot from Ignite Server

WWN on AIX: How To?

WWN on HP-UX: How To?

HP-UX depothelper to download dependencies for open source ports

NTFS write support on Mac OS X 10.8.2

Bash loop one liners that are must have

Mobile platform possibilities

MySQL on Windows…port connection refused

Bullseye merge code coverage files

Linux : Fedora 17 released

C++11 Style by Bjarne Stroustrup

HTC ChaCha on low storage space

Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive

How Linux is built – The Linux foundation video

Linux open ports – How To

Windows Live Writer could not post to blogger solved

Software Testing : Differences Defect Severity Vs Priority

Software Testing Course

OpenSUSE 12.1 and Multimedia

Process monitoring on Unix/Linux/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX

CPU Info – Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX

High Availability Lens 3

TechSutram(/=1)